by Dennis Foley
“Okay, keep your eyes down on the darker areas. Try not to look up at the horizon. It’ll be dark in the tree line, and if your eyes aren’t dilated, you won’t see shit down inside the overhang there.”
“Yessir,” Hollister responded. He felt the motion of the chopper’s descent in his stomach, and his heart was pounding with uncertainty.
“Looked like a couple of them carrying weapons on the northwest corner of the clearing. Soon as I saw them, they were running—they just dove into the tree line,” the crew chief said.
“Let’s see if we can smoke ’em out.” Taylor reached down to the two banks of miniswitches on the console and turned on two of the radios. “Jim, you call this in to your folks and I’ll call mine. You’re on the right freq.
“I want everyone to know where the fuck we are, in case one of those little fuckers gets lucky and adds a chopper to the notches on his belt,” Taylor said.
It was the first time getting shot down had come to Hollister’s mind.
“There they are, sir!” the crew chief yelled. “Nine o’clock … under the overhang.”
Taylor turned the chopper toward the tree line and smoked over the treetops with all three of them searching for a glimpse of the VC.
As they cleared the tree line with no one calling out a sighting over the intercom, Taylor yanked the nose of the chopper up and did a hard pedal turn, spinning the chopper on its own vertical axis, allowing it to start back and down again without making a wide turn out of the area.
Just then Hollister yelled out, “Holy shit—trucks! There’s a truck down there.” He pointed over the instrument panel at a spot on his side of the chopper.
Tilting the chopper right and down, Taylor turned toward the spot and looked across Hollister’s side of the chopper.
“I only got a quick look at it, but it looked like the back of it was filled with weapons and covered with a tarp. Maybe two VC crouched down next to the right front tire,” Hollister added.
“You got that sixty on ’em?” Taylor asked the crew chief.
“I’m on it, sir,” the crew chief said. He had already taken the free machine gun and hung it out the door by a bungee cord.
Taylor brought the chopper to a hover over the spot that Hollister had pointed out and alternately pressed the pedals gently while he moved the cyclic in a tight circle. The action caused the hovering chopper to blow the treetops around in various directions so the three Americans could see down to the ground.
As the tree cover parted they clearly saw a truck and two old Vietnamese men huddled near the front. Taylor hovered lower, knowing that the debris being blown around by the downdraft would limit the ability of the men on the ground to fire on the chopper. He knew that he was doing it right when he saw the Vietnamese shielding their eyes.
“Weapons? Anybody see any weapons?” Taylor asked hurriedly over the intercom.
“There’s something under the cab, too,” Hollister said.
Just then the canvas covering the load blew loose and flipped back, revealing the contents. It wasn’t weapons. It was wood. Firewood. Just firewood. Nothing else. They weren’t VC.
Taylor looked over at Hollister. “Shit! I’m gonna go a little lower. Look around for me. I don’t want to get fixed on these two clowns and find out that a VC division is on the next hill adjusting its sights to blow our asses out of the sky.”
Hollister started scanning the area around them for other threats, while the crew chief kept the muzzle of his machine gun on the two Viets. Taylor bled off a little more altitude, till the chopper was only about four feet off the ground.
The Vietnamese cowered in terror, then they suddenly acted as if no longer afraid. Hollister wondered if they recognized the chopper to be American.
They kept shielding their eyes and stood—palms to the chopper. They seemed to be trying to tell Taylor and Hollister that they had no weapons, that they were noncombatants.
Taylor spoke up. “Those aren’t weapons under the truck. Just some more wood. Fuck!” He shook his head in disgust. “We could have killed these two without ever knowing they were civilians.
“Okay, let’s get out of here. Let’s let these two poor suckers get their firewood home. Chief? I’m coming out and back.”
The crew chief put down the machine gun and looked behind the chopper. “You’re clear up and back, sir.”
All the way back to the LRP pad Taylor bitched about the near disaster. He was angry that he’d believed the area was clear without cross-checking it himself.
Hollister was a little confused by what had just happened. But he was happy that the firing run had not ended as badly as it could have. It would have been easy for them to shoot first and find out the mistake later. He wondered if the Vietnamese could have been VC posing as woodcutters. But from the air they wouldn’t have been able to prove it, and killing them wouldn’t have confirmed anything. He was sure that if they had killed the woodcutters, there would have been a picture of another new widow in one of their pockets—another Ly. He felt a little nauseous.
Inside Operations, Hollister, Michaelson, and Taylor sat in a small circle smoking and drinking cold Cokes while they listened to Sergeant Lam, the Vietnamese interpreter, talking in a high-pitched, rapid-fire whine to someone at the Province Headquarters Operations section.
No one knew what Lam was saying, but he was clearly getting very frustrated by what he was hearing. Finally, he slammed down the receiver of the field phone.
He turned to Captain Michaelson. “They say you must be wrong place,” Lam said, looking at Captain Taylor.
“Whoa, cowboy! We were fuckin’-A at the coordinates I said we were at!” Taylor yelled, jumping to his feet.
“Did someone talk to Colonel Minh?” Hollister asked Sergeant Lam.
“They tell me cannot bother Colonel Minh. He very busy,” Lam answered.
Michaelson rubbed his hands across his face and squeezed the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger. “Okay … okay. Thank you, Sergeant Lam,” he said. “This isn’t your fault. We’ll try to get this sorted out between Brigade and Province Headquarters.”
Sergeant Lam executed something that was a cross between a salute and a bow, then exited as fast as he could get out of the tent. Hollister assumed that he felt badly about not being able to solve the problem, and wanted to avoid the loss of face.
Captain Michaelson turned to Taylor and Hollister. “Gentlemen, my opinion of today’s goat-roping exercise is that it sucks! I’ve seen this kind of shit happen before, and I don’t know why there aren’t more damn dead South Viets than there are. They make us clear every fuckin’ thing with them, but they don’t seem to give a shit about their own folks!” He pulled his hat out of his pocket and slapped it across his palm. “Let’s all go get some chow. We can work on this a bit more later. We’re not finished with it by a long shot.”
Taylor and Hollister walked across the compound toward the chopper pad.
“Well, thanks for the shooting lesson anyhow, sir,” Hollister said. “Sorry it turned out like it did.”
“Yeah, that’s ’bout as pissed off as I’ve seen Michaelson in all the years I’ve known him.”
“How long’s that been?”
“We went through jump school together and he went off to Bragg for green hat training. I went to flight school. Then we were in the advanced course together at Benning, and then I was flying outa Can Tho, down in the Delta, when he was an advisor with the zips.”
“He’s a good man,” Hollister said.
“More than you know. Plenty of folks on the ground can fuck you over and leave you hanging out to dry when you’re flying a gunship. Michaelson never did that to any pilot that I ever heard of. He didn’t call us ’less he needed us, and when he used us he didn’t try to become a little king on the other end of the radio. He’s a good man, all right. He ever needs anything from me, anything—he’ll damn sure get it.”
The two reached the chopper, and the crew chief j
umped out and started to untie the chopper blades.
Just then Bernard burst out of Operations whistling and waving his arms over his head. Once he got Taylor’s and Hollister’s attention, he broke into a run and skidded to a stop in the grit on the LRP pad.
“Sir,” Bernard said to Taylor, “the Old Man sent me out here to get you before you lifted off. He wanted me to tell you and Lieutenant Hollister that he just got off the horn with Brigade, and the ambushes have been pushed off for twenty-four hours till they can get this Rules of Engagement flap squared away.” He turned to Taylor. “Oh, ah … and you’re supposed to call your Operations shop before you leave, sir.”
Taylor motioned to his crew chief. “Whoa, tie ’er back up, we aren’t going anywhere just yet.”
Bernard looked to Hollister for some acknowledgment.
“Okay, thanks, Bernard. Tell the Old Man we got the message.”
“Yessir,” Bernard said as he saluted, then he turned on one heel to run back to the Operations tent.
“So—buy you a cup of coffee?” Hollister asked Taylor.
“Ain’t gonna be as good as aviator coffee—but it’s better than swamp water ’n’ Kool Aid,” Taylor said, slapping Hollister on the back.
The cooks were just starting to prepare the dinner meal in the mess hall when Hollister and Taylor entered. They found the coffee and a place to sit as far away from the kitchen area and its deadly humidity as they could get. Taylor took off his aviator sunglasses and dropped them on the mess table. “Ya know, I just don’t know who the hell is luckier—us or those gooks out there.”
Hollister shook his head in silent sympathy. He was still trying to absorb the near-miss situation.
“You can bet your ass that I’ll set my own fuckin’ Rules of Engagement from here on out.”
“Sounds okay, if it doesn’t jeopardize your folks doing it.”
“It’s not like having friendlies on the ground. Either you’re down there to tell me that you’ve checked their ID cards or I can just pull up, go around, and take a second look.”
The door to the orderly room opened and filled with the bulk of First Sergeant Evan-Clark. “Can a man get a cup’a coffee in here, or have officers drunk it all up?” he said loud enough for Taylor and Hollister to hear.
“Okay, Top,” Hollister said. “Get yourself a cup and come over and tell us one of your stories from the Crimean War.”
Easy filled his cup and turned to Taylor and Hollister with a big grin under his mustache. “Okay, okay, Lieutenant. That was a low blow. I give up. I should know better than to be accusin’ no junior officers of nothin’—I always end up regrettin’ it.”
Hollister picked up the cue. “If it weren’t for officers, Top, they wouldn’t make coffee, since we all know that senior NCOs operate off of ninety-proof blood and raw meat.”
Easy put his cup down on the table and raised his hands in the air. “Okay, sir. I surrender. We are a sorry lot that keep the army on track and winning wars while you all are out wearing fancy uniforms and wooin’ the ladies. It’s a thankless job—”
“… but somebody’s got to do it,” both officers chimed.
Easy’s tone turned serious. “I heard about the woodcutter thing this morning. I’m happy it didn’t turn out for the worst.”
“Thanks, Top,” Captain Taylor said. “It coulda been real bad news.”
“Yessir—those guys just mighta knocked down your chopper with them sticks,” Easy said, bursting into laughter.
Taylor smiled. “First Sergeant … I won’t forget this soon. There’ll be a time when you’ll need something from us aviators, and we just might be too busy to help you out.”
Easy picked up his coffee and smiled. “Well, sir, I can see I’m outclassed here. But it always does take at least two of you to gang up on a poor old hardworkin’ first soldier like myself. Anyway, time is money, like they say out in that hippie commie civilian world, and I have to make some piasters for God and country.”
Easy raised his cup as a gesture of respect, “By yer leave, sirs.”
Taylor and Hollister said good-bye and watched Easy disappear back through the door to his office.
“He’s really a good man to have around. Even if it means putting up with his bullshit,” Hollister said.
Taylor shook his head. “We’re running out of guys like him. We’ve lost two really good old-timers in the Aviation battalion in the last month alone. They can see that this Vietnam thing isn’t going to go away soon, and they’re tired of it. All of them already have a couple of wars under their belts, and they don’t want to check out in this one.”
“Can you blame them?”
Taylor pushed his empty cup away from him and stood up. “No, I can’t.”
Hollister was just stepping in the door of his hooch when he heard the strangest sound. He stopped right in the doorway and soon realized that it was his replacement, Virgil. He was lying faceup across his bunk in his olive-drab boxer shorts—sound asleep and snoring. Hollister remembered that Virgil had not slept in the hooch the night before, because he had pulled Duty Officer, which required him to be awake in Operations and to periodically make the rounds of the compound to make sure everything was in order.
Hollister had pulled many nights as Duty Officer. The dull nights when there were no teams on the ground were spent catching up on letter writing and drinking lots of coffee.
On nights when teams were out, the Duty Officer could count on having only the early part of the evening for letter writing. For the remainder of the evening the pattern was quite different. On the half hour, the teams checked in with a commo check or a sitrep. Just waiting for each team to call in provided enough tension. But it usually got more intense as the evening progressed.
Very often a team would call in that it had enemy movement around it. That was not unusual. If they even had an idea where a team was located, they would move in close after dark. Then they would lay up until the wee hours of the morning and either attack or probe for the team’s exact location.
Usually, a report of movement forced the Duty Officer’s first decision. Should he tell Captain Michaelson? The answer depended on if Michaelson was asleep or not. If he was in his office or just up somewhere in the compound, he would let the Duty Officer know where he was. If he had gone to bed, he usually told the Duty Officer to wake him up at the earliest indication of enemy movement.
Most of the time Hollister and the other Duty Officers waited a little bit because they didn’t want to keep calling wolf, which could turn the CO into a zombie after a few nights. It was a judgment call that came from experience on the ground and a little questioning of the team leader’s opinion of the threat.
In all cases, whether they woke the Old Man or not, a messenger would be sent out to the chopper crews, who were sleeping in their birds so they could inject their own preflight needs into a possible contact launch. The sleep problem wasn’t as critical with the pilots and crews since they were rotated every night and only pulled standby for the LRPs every other night.
Hollister looked outside and checked out the sun. He decided that he would take some writing paper outside and get some letters written while he had a few minutes to himself. He could use the sun, and it would keep him from waking up Lieutenant Virgil.
A large bunker with a reinforced, sandbagged roof occupied the center of the compound only a few yards from Hollister’s hooch. It was built to withstand the few mortar and rocket attacks that they had had since the compound was built. Hollister spread a poncho liner out on top of the soggy sandbags and stretched out.
He wore a pair of cutoff PT shorts, his shower shoes, and his floppy hat to shade his eyes. He reminded himself that he wanted to scrounge a pair of aviator sunglasses from one of the pilots. His last pair had suffered a mortal wound when he sat on them a month earlier.
The letter to Susan was both easy and difficult to write. He loved to talk to her, even if it was in a letter. The hard part was telling her tha
t they were going to Benning—if she still wanted to marry him. He thought that he would try to prepare her for Fort Benning with a little bit of light comment about her backing out of the marriage.
He had a number of questions for her. Now that they knew where he was going to be stationed, what did she want to do? Would she quit her job in New York or was it something that she could do from Georgia? He knew how hard she had been working—trying to get a byline. He was worried that the move would cause her to lose ground. Nothing came to mind that might compensate her.
And what about the wedding? They hadn’t talked about where they would get married, or how, or who was going to be invited, or a date. The more he wrote, the more questions occurred to him. He flipped over a second page and jotted down question fragments that were coming to him faster than he could form the questions in the letter.
“Loo’ten’an?”
Looking around, Hollister found Sergeant Lam standing there awkwardly—as if he did not want to be seen.
“Yeah, Lam. What is it?”
“I mus’talk.”
Hollister sat up and spun around. He reached for a cigarette and offered one to Lam. Lam took it and made a little bow. “So, what is it?”
Hollister suspected that this might be a feeling out conversation. He had been through this with interpreters before. They tended to be scam artists who were capitalizing on their limited command of the English language. Assignment to the LRPs kept them out of direct combat, and they were close to base camps where they could scrounge or even steal. It was a much better deal than being an interpreter for a rifle company that spent most of its time in the field.
In Hollister’s experience they frequently acted amiable and friendly, and then hit up the Americans for little favors—like buying them things at the PX or converting black market Military Pay Certificates into Vietnamese piasters.
Lam seemed to be uncomfortable with whatever he had on his chest. Hollister tried to get him to wind down by pointing out a spot on the bunker for him to sit.
“I talk to some friends. Oh, I cannot tell you name. They tell me som’thing you need to know. You mus’ not tell ARVN soldiers or Colonel Minh that Lam tell you. Okay?” Lam said, looking at Hollister with fear.